


October, Montana

by oselle



Series: Birthright [32]
Category: The Faculty (1998)
Genre: Alien Resistance, Aliens, Alternate Universe, Angst, Conspiracy, Friendship/Love, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Mental Health Issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-03
Updated: 2013-09-03
Packaged: 2017-12-25 12:47:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,608
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/953274
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oselle/pseuds/oselle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Zeke and Casey, learning to live with their decisions.</p>
            </blockquote>





	October, Montana

There was a library in the cellar of the Montana safehouse, but it didn’t have the latest bestsellers and magazines. It had reports, on paper, on microfilm, on disc, thousands of reports spanning more than fifty years. Newspaper reports shouting with exaggeration. Government reports droning with facts.  
  
Zeke got into the habit of staying up late, reading those reports. Some of them started out almost humorously, like the one about the town in Texas that had experienced a mysterious rain of pink, Jell-O-like matter in the summer of 1962. That had gotten some good local newspaper coverage, complete with shots of grinning townsfolk cheerfully shoveling the goop as if it were snow. It had all been pretty funny until Zeke found the FBI and CDC documents reporting that almost everyone in that town had contracted some form of cancer between the years 1964 and 1980. By 1989 the town hadn’t existed anymore—the people who were still living had just quietly moved away. Not so funny.  
  
That was Zeke’s bedtime reading, and the library at the safehouse had an endless supply of it. He read about kids disappearing from their own beds and turning up days later, miles away from home. He read about weird lights and crop circles and mysterious fires, about perfectly normal people who seemed to go insane overnight, and spent the rest of their lives in institutions babbling about creatures and conspiracies. He read through a 473-page document matter-of-factly titled _Incident P701694, Herrington Ohio/September 1998_ and he saw his own name there, and Casey’s, Stokely’s, Stan’s, all of them, and read dispassionate details about the “incident” that had blown their lives apart.  
  
On a night in early October, Zeke found a gray archival box with no label. When he took off the lid, he saw that the box was filled with manila files. The front of the top file was imprinted with the official seal of the State of Ohio—two wheat sheaves beneath a giant, cartoonish sun. Zeke remembered seeing the same incongruously cheerful image on his parole papers. The typewritten label on each file tab read: CONNOR, CASEY M./DOB: 05-23-82/ADMTD: 10-15-98   
  
Zeke sat on the floor for a long time, staring at Casey’s name. Then he put the lid on the box and put it back on the shelf.  


  
_____  
  


In the end, Zeke read the files, thinking of all the years he had clumsily and blindly taken care of Casey, wishing desperately that he could have had even a glimpse of his medical records, any understanding of what they had done to him.  
  
Zeke read endless lists of drugs and pharmaceutical notations that might as well have been in code. He read about Casey’s suicide attempt and his so-called symptoms—his delusions, paranoia, hallucinations and violent outbursts. He read about shock treatments and days spent in restraints and things administered intravenously. There were transcripts of bewildering sessions between Casey and his doctors, and of conversations between Casey and his mother, which Zeke was certain neither of them had known were being recorded. Other transcripts were conspicuously missing, those of sessions between Casey and visitors whose names Zeke did not recognize and who never seemed to fill in the “Relation to Patient” box on the Visitor’s Log. Zeke did recognize one name, “Fox Mulder,” and under “Relation to Patient,” he had put three letters, “FBI.” Zeke ran his finger over the name and thought about the card that had sat in his wallet for years, and wished again that he had been able to trust this Mulder before it had all been too late.  
  
As he came to the end of the files, Zeke saw the sessions between Casey and his doctors become widely spaced apart, and in each one Casey was more confused, less aware of reality. Zeke could follow the emergence of the shattered Casey that he had known and taken care of for so long.  
  
The last entry was dated November 27, 1999. Casey’s doctor had made a house call at the Connors that morning and she had summarized her visit with a list of medications and dosages and a single phrase, in her scrawling doctor’s hand: _Patient is doing very well_.  
  
Zeke had paid his own house call at the Connors on November 27, 1999. _Patient is doing very well_ , the doctor had said, but when Casey’s mother had brought Zeke upstairs he had found a hollow shell of a kid who had been watching cartoons and drooling on himself. _Patient is doing very well_ , Zeke thought and the rage rose up in him as if he were living that day all over again.  
  
Zeke put the files away and went out onto the porch where he shakily lit a cigarette. It was just past two in the morning and the moon was high and white over the mountains. Zeke saw none of it. Instead he saw Casey on his bed in his childhood room, wearing a Herrington High sweatshirt, staring vacantly at nothing. He saw Casey throwing up and blacking out, having seizures and searing headaches, huddled in the corners of an endless series of dingy motel rooms, screaming and weeping and clawing at himself, hiding under beds and in closets, slamming his head against walls. _Patient is doing very well._  


  
_____  
  


The new Casey, the one that Dr. Stanley had brought out, was not the one Zeke had lived with for five years, but he was not the old Herrington Casey, either.  
  
In truth, Zeke had hardly known _that_ Casey at all; they wouldn’t even have been in the same class if Casey hadn’t been promoted into junior high a year early and Zeke hadn’t wound up repeating his senior year. That Casey had been in the same English Lit class as Zeke for those three weeks in September before Herrington had gone to hell, and Zeke had only one memory of him.  
  
They had been reading a poem in class—Keats, John Keats. The word “faggot” had been in it, and Zeke had seen it coming, had waited for the reaction, and it hadn’t even taken a beat of time for some guy in the back to yell out, “Yo, Casey, it’s about you, man!” Miss Burke had needed a full five minutes to get the class quieted down after that. During the whole thing, Casey had stared resolutely at his book as if nothing had happened, but Zeke had watched with a sort of bored fascination as a red flush of anger or humiliation, probably both, had blossomed out of Casey’s shirt collar and crept up his neck and face. _Bet you can’t wait for the year to be over_ , Zeke had thought dryly, never imagining that Casey Connor would soon have much worse things to endure than his last year of high school.  
  
The new Casey, this Montana Casey, was a different one altogether, but almost as unfamiliar to Zeke as that old Herrington one had been. Zeke had known the sick Casey, he had understood his moods and fears and needs, how to comfort him, calm him down or cheer him up, how to get him to sleep or eat. This Casey was often distant, and he could fly into rages or sink into depressions over which Zeke was powerless. After taking care of Casey for so long, Zeke suddenly did not know how to help him, and Casey did not seem to want him to try. Zeke stayed away, giving Casey his space.  


  
_____  
  


It took Zeke days to decide whether or not to tell Casey about his medical records, not sure whether it would be better for Casey not to know, or for him to have this final evidence that even the things he himself had sometimes thought were delusions had all been real.  
  
They were out on the porch when Zeke finally told him. Casey said nothing at first, but when he dragged on his cigarette, his hand shook.  
  
Then Casey smiled and exhaled. He turned to Zeke and said, “I don’t need to read them. I lived them once, you know?”  
  
“Yeah,” Zeke had said. “I know, man.”  
  
Casey was silent, watching the glowing ash on his cigarette grow longer. After a while, he asked, “Did you read them?”  
  
“Yeah.”  
  
Casey rolled the cigarette slowly between his thumb and forefinger. Ashes dusted the steps at his feet.  
  
“It was all real, wasn’t it?” he asked quietly. “I didn’t imagine any of it?”  
  
“No. It all happened.”  
  
“Okay,” Casey said tersely.  “So now you know.” He stood up, put his cigarette out in the sand-pail, and went inside.  
  
“Now I know,” Zeke repeated to himself, but felt like he knew nothing at all.  He stayed on the porch for an hour, watching stormclouds pass over the distant hills  


  
_____  
  


Things at the ranch had been better when Stokely had still been with them. As long as the three of them had been together, Zeke had felt determined, certain that he had made the right decision, and it had seemed that somehow, they would be all right.  
  
Stokely had left at the end of September. To Zeke, it had absurdly felt as if summer vacation was over. The old Rod Stewart song, “Maggie May,” had been on the radio almost every time Zeke had gotten in the car, with its plaintive lyrics, _It’s late September and I really should be back at school_. Zeke did not know where he should be, or Casey. He had often felt young since that other September six years before, young and stupid. Now he felt old, burned out. They had been kids when all of this had started, and now Zeke was twenty-four, Casey, twenty-two. Casey would probably have been heading back to graduate school if things had worked out differently. God only knew what Zeke would have been doing.  
  
Stokely had not been able to tell them where she was going. Zeke felt adrift without her, alone with this remote Casey, among strangers who all seemed to have some important work to do. Zeke didn’t like doing nothing, but no one gave him anything to do, and so he waited. He watched. He smoked. He spent long hours in the library. When his reading finally gave him a splitting headache he went to bed and lay awake, wondering if Casey was all right, if he was sleeping, if he was having nightmares, if one day he or Casey would be sent away, and not be able to tell each other where they were going. He thought about the envelopes Stokely had given them, complete sets of their new identities. He still had his. He wondered if Casey did, too.  


  
_____  
  


The warm weather had held through the beginning of October, but two weeks before Halloween the frost had come, and on a Friday night near the end of the month, it began to snow in light, lacy flurries.  
  
Zeke stayed up late, but he had given himself a break from the library. He couldn’t stand reading those reports anymore; they made feel angry and hopeless at once, and they made him want to know what exactly all of these people here were planning to do, and what any of it meant for himself and Casey.  
  
He had not seen Casey that day, and Zeke decided to sit up in the main room. It was just off the front hall, and he hoped that Casey might come down and go out on the porch for a late smoke. The main room had a fieldstone fireplace, and Zeke built up a fire, grabbed a book off the shelf and sat down to read. He flipped through the book disinterestedly, listening for footsteps on the stairs. The fire settled into whispering embers and the room became dark and Zeke dozed off.  
  
Zeke had the sort of dream that comes in light sleep, in which part of him knew he was dreaming. He was in Minnesota, standing outside the trailer they had rented there, but all around was a flat, snow-covered field, not even the scrubby pines that had been there in reality. At a great distance, Zeke saw a small, dark shape moving against the white, and he knew that it was Casey, wearing that old navy coat he’d had, the one that had been three sizes too big for him. _He lost that coat, he left it behind at that place in Fargo_ , Zeke thought, but it was only a dream, so it didn’t matter.  
  
 _Hey, Casey!_ he shouted, and the snow seemed to absorb his voice like a soundproofed room. Casey turned around and although Zeke couldn’t see his face, he saw him wave. Then Casey turned back and started walking in the other direction again. Zeke could see him lifting his knees high in the deep snow.  
  
Zeke began to wade towards him with long, clumsy steps. _Casey, don’t go so far!_ he called out, but Casey did not turn around this time, and Zeke broke into a loping run, his breath puffing out before him in the frozen air. _Hey,_ he panted, finally catching up to Casey, _Hey man._  He put his hand on Casey’s shoulder and Casey turned around, laughing, his nose and cheeks red from the cold, his eyes as intensely bright as the winter sky.  
  
Zeke woke up and rubbed his eyes, the dream-sight of Casey’s face lingering in them like a camera flash. The fire had died down to coals and the clock on the mantel said it was almost three a.m. He got up and checked the porch but Casey was not out there. No one was out there and a fine dusting of snow covered the steps and the railing, glittering in the porchlight. Zeke’s memory, always razor-sharp, suddenly tossed up the lines from the poem that had been such a riot at Miss Burke’s English Lit class in that long-gone September: _The sear faggot blazes bright/Spirit of a winter’s night._ Zeke felt as if a thousand years had passed since he had last heard those lines, a thousand years and thousands of hard miles that had brought himself and Casey from that classroom to this quiet place, this safe place, for a little while.  
  
Zeke went upstairs and passed Casey’s room, and thought about looking in on him, but it was so late and he didn’t want to wake him up. He went to his own room, got undressed and lay down without turning on the light.  
  
It was so warm in the bed that Zeke knew he wasn’t alone. He turned over onto his back and even though he had not shared a bed with Casey in months, Zeke instinctively reached his arm out, the old familiar gesture of making sure Casey was there. Then Zeke could see Casey in the faint light that came up from the porch, curled up on his side and awake, his eyes faraway and sad.  
  
“Casey?” he said softly. “What’s wrong?”  
  
“Nothing,” Casey answered.  
  
“Yeah?”  
  
Casey blinked slowly and took a deep breath. “I read them,” he said.  
  
Zeke looked at Casey for a long moment, not knowing what to say. Finally, he asked, “You okay?”  
  
Casey nodded. “Yeah…I think so. I knew it all, you know? But…” He paused. “I saw the papers. The ones my parents signed. They gave the hospital full authority to do whatever they wanted. ‘Any treatment,’ it said. And they _signed_ that. I’d always thought that maybe they hadn’t known until it was too late but they…that was the week I went in, Zeke. They never even _tried_ …”  
  
“Casey…”  
  
“I tried to talk to them so many times…my mother…I tried to tell her and all the time they had already given up. They let them…those _people_ …do whatever they wanted, from the very _beginning_.”  
  
Zeke turned over and put his hand on Casey’s arm. “Hey…hey. It’s over. Forget it, it’s done. Forget _them_. _Fuck_ them.”  
  
“It’s _not_ over. It’ll _never_ be over.”  
  
“That part of it is,” Zeke said firmly. “You’ve just got to let it go, Casey. We’ve just got to keep moving.  
  
Casey’s face twisted and he shut his eyes tightly. Zeke thought he was crying but Casey’s eyes were dry when he opened them.  
  
“ _You_ never gave up. _They_ did, but not you. You never gave up, Zeke.”  
  
Zeke rubbed Casey’s arm slowly. “Because you didn’t.”  
  
Casey uttered a curt, “Right,” then closed his eyes. “Man, what the fuck would have happened to me without you?”  
  
“You wouldn’t have gotten to see America one shitty motel at a time?” Zeke asked. Casey coughed out a dry laugh, then fell silent.  
  
“I miss Stokely,” he said after a moment. “I hope she’s all right.”  
  
“So do I,” Zeke answered, to both statements.  
  
“I miss you, too” Casey said. He opened his eyes and looked up, and Zeke saw all the Caseys he had ever known. He saw the Casey who’d gotten regularly poled at Herrington High and the one who had urged them to fight on that endless September day. The kid he’d found reduced to almost nothing, lying on his bed in his parents’ house. He saw the broken Casey and the psychotic Casey, the child and the real Caseys that he had protected and barely tolerated and loved for years. He saw the new Casey, who was all of those others, who was determined and strong yet sorrowful and lonely,  
and lost.  
  
Zeke squeezed Casey’s arm lightly. “I’m still here,” he said. “I’m not going anywhere.”  
  
“You said that in Minnesota, remember? After I was sick.”  
  
“I remember,” Zeke said. “I never knew you did, though.”  
  
“I remember everything about Minnesota. That Christmas…I thought of it today, when it was snowing. That was…it wasn’t all bad, was it?”  
  
Zeke smiled wryly. “It had its moments.”  
  
Casey shifted a little so that he was closer to Zeke. He brought his hand to Zeke’s face and bent his head so that their foreheads were almost touching.  
  
“Zeke…”  
  
“What is it, Casey?” Zeke said quietly. “What do you want?”  
  
“I want to stay here tonight,” Casey whispered  
  
“You can stay, Casey. You can always stay. You don’t have to ask.”  
  
“Okay,” Casey said, and nodded. His hair brushed Zeke’s forehead. “Thank you.”  
  
Zeke looked at Casey, feeling his own heart beat heavily in his chest, in his ears, against his eyes. He said, “Casey,” so softly it was little more than a breath.  
  
Casey looked up at Zeke, and smiled, but said nothing.  
  
Zeke put his arm around Casey, drawing him close. He kissed him on the cheek and felt Casey smile. Zeke hid his face in the side of Casey’s neck, as Casey had so often done to him. He wanted to pull Casey into himself. He wanted never to let him go.  
  
“Casey,” Zeke said. “Casey.” He kissed Casey’s shoulder and neck and cheek. Casey sighed and wrapped his arms around Zeke, and Zeke pulled him even closer and kissed him on the mouth, as he had not done since that long-ago Christmas Eve.  
  
Casey made a desperate sound and responded to the kiss, his hands twisting in the back of Zeke’s shirt. Then he shuddered and hitched a deep breath and Zeke realized Casey was crying, shaking with deep, tearing sobs. He stopped kissing Casey and held him, one hand on his back and the other behind his head, as if holding Casey tightly enough would keep him from breaking apart. Zeke had seen Casey cry many times, helpless, childlike tears of pain, or fear, or confusion, but Casey had never cried like this, not in all the years they had been together.  
  
“I’m sorry, Zeke, I’m so sorry, oh God, I’m so sorry for everything,” Casey gasped.  
  
“No,” Zeke whispered. “Don’t, Casey, don’t, don’t,” and he wanted to say, _I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry I dragged you all over the country, I’m sorry I didn’t think of my fucking trust fund, I’m sorry I didn’t get Mulder to help you, I’m sorry I abandoned you when you told the truth, I’m sorry I never said anything to you after that day in Miss Burke’s class, and Jesus, I love you and I am so fucking sorry._ But Zeke could not say any of those things, not now, not yet.  
  
Zeke had Casey almost completely folded into himself. He rocked him in a slow, comforting rhythm until Casey finally quieted and went limp in Zeke’s arms. Zeke would have thought Casey was asleep if he were not able to feel him blinking, his wet eyelashes grazing the side of Zeke’s neck.  
  
“You can still walk away, Zeke,” he said after a while. He sounded resigned, exhausted. “I know what I said in the coffee shop, but don’t stay for me. Not after everything else. I’d understand. No questions asked.”  
  
Zeke thought of the envelope again, his new self, sitting there, waiting. His and Casey’s. Then he turned his mind away from it. Thousands of hard miles had brought them here, and there was no walking away.  
  
Zeke shifted to look at Casey. “I won’t walk away, Casey. But I’ll always be with you, no matter what. No questions asked. Okay?”  
  
“Okay,” Casey said. He sighed and put his forehead on Zeke’s shoulder. “Can I still stay here?”  
  
“Yeah,” Zeke said, and was quiet for a moment. “I need you to stay.”  
  
“Thanks, Zeke.”  
  
“Go to sleep, Casey.”  
  
Casey fell asleep and Zeke followed not long after, while early snow came down from the mountains. 


End file.
